THE WORK in construction was a lot more physically challenging than being an electrician. I got stronger and stronger, lifting extension ladders and paint cans and two-by-fours, loading and unloading the pickup. By the end of August we were almost finished with our work preparing the warden’s house for its new resident, painting the garage door bright red and cleaning up the postconstruction debris. It was an old New England house that had been expanded a couple of times, with low ceilings and tiny upstairs bedrooms, but it was comfortable enough. It was nice to spend time in a house, after months of living in a barracks. At the far edge of the prison grounds, my coworkers and I would scatter around the empty house to finish various projects.

One afternoon, alone in the upstairs bathroom, I caught my reflection in the big mirror with surprise. I looked as though years had fallen away from me, shed like dry old snakeskin. I took off my white baseball cap and pulled my hair out of its ponytail and looked at myself again. I locked the bathroom door. Then I took off my khaki shirt and my white T-shirt and shucked off my pants. I was standing in my white sports bra, granny panties, and steel-toes. I took those off. I looked at my own body in the mirror, seeing myself naked for the first time in seven months. In the Dorms there was never a moment or a place where a woman could stand and stretch and regard herself and confront who she was physically.

Standing there naked in the warden’s bathroom, I could see that prison had changed me. Most of the accumulated varnish of the five unhappy years spent on pretrial was gone. Except for a decade’s worth of crinkly smile lines around my eyes, I resembled the girl who had jumped off that waterfall more closely than I had in years.

The red maple and sourwood trees were already starting to change color, which thrilled me with the promise of an early fall and the speedy arrival of winter. In Danbury I had learned to hasten the days by chasing the enjoyment in them, no matter how elusive. Some people on the outside look for what is amiss in every interaction, every relationship, and every meal; they are always trying to hang their mortality on improvement. It was incredibly liberating to instead tackle the trick of making each day fly more quickly.

“Time, be my friend,” I repeated every day. Soon I would go down to the track and try to chase the day away by running in circles. Even under very bad circumstances life still held its pleasures, like running and Natalie’s homemade cookies and Pop’s stories. It was these simple things that were within your grasp in the degraded circumstances of life in prison; the things you could do yourself, or the small kindnesses one prisoner could extend to another.

I needed some track time after a long day of painting the lobby down the hill. It was the new warden’s first day on the job, and to celebrate, I overheard that they shook down the whole FCI, a tremendous and rare undertaking encompassing twelve units of twelve hundred women and every one of their lockers. I was pretty sure the Camp’s turn would come quickly. The feds were looking for cigarettes.

The Bureau of Prisons had decreed that all of its institutions were to go smoke-free by 2008. It put financial incentives in place for prisons to do it even before the deadline. Warden Deboo’s parting shot to the women of Danbury was to impose the ban, to officially take hold on September 1. The preceding months had seen extensive communications about the ban. First of all, the commissary ginned up the demand for cigarettes in July, trying to get rid of their stock. Then in August everyone had one month in which to smoke their brains out before going cold turkey on one of the most addictive drugs known to man.

Truthfully, I didn’t much care about the smoking ban. I would never have admitted it to Larry or my mother in the visiting room, but I’d have a social cigarette now and then with Allie B. or Little Janet or Jae. A pal from the electric shop had taught me how to make a lighter out of a scrap of tinsel, two AA batteries, bits of copper wire, and some black electricians’ tape. But I could do without it all easily. Cigarettes were killing the “real” smokers, though, and the long twice-daily pill line included not just the people getting psych meds but also women who desperately needed their heart or diabetes medication to stay standing. According to the CDC, cigarettes kill over 435,000 people a year in the United States. Most of us in Danbury were locked away for trading in illegal drugs. The annual death toll of illegal drug addicts, according to the same government study? Seventeen thousand. Heroin or coffin nails, you be the judge.

When September rolled around, a lot of prisoners were flat-out depressed. They sneaked smokes in absurd spots, practically begging to be caught. Every time I rounded the track, I’d surprise a new group rustling in the bushes. Then the shakedowns began in earnest, and they started hauling people off to the SHU. The ever-canny Pop had negotiated with her work supervisor that she’d be allowed one protected smoke at the end of her shift and a safe hidey-hole in the kitchen.

The Camp population continued to dwindle, with many empty beds. The place felt quiet, which was nice, but I missed my loud friends and neighbors who had departed: Allie B., Colleen, and Lili Cabrales. As soon as the “Martha moratorium” was lifted, the Camp would get dozens of freaks rushed in, ruining our temporarily placid prison lives. Per Larry’s instructions, I had been watching more television but not the news. The presidential campaign was barely noted on the inside. Instead, I joined the crowd for the much-anticipated Video Music Awards in August. “What up, B?” asked Jay-Z, and the visiting room filled with squeals. In prison, everyone sings along.

SEPTEMBER 16 was the day of the prison Job Fair, an annual Danbury FCI event that paid lip service to the fact that its prisoners would rejoin the world. So far I had witnessed no meaningful effort to prepare inmates for successful reentry into society, other than the handful of women who had gone through the intensive drug treatment program. Maybe the Job Fair would impart some useful information to the crowd.

I was lucky to have a job waiting for me when I went home: a generous friend had created a position for me at the company he ran. Every time he came to visit me, Dan would say, “Would you hurry up and get out of here? The marketing department needs you!”

Hardly any of the women I knew in Danbury were as fortunate. The top three worries for women getting released from prison are usually: reuniting with their children (if they are a single mother, they have often lost their parental rights); housing (a huge problem for people with a record); and employment. I had written enough jailhouse résumés by now to know that a lot of the ladies had only worked in the (enormous) underground economy. Outside the mainstream, they didn’t have the first notion of how to break into it. So far, nothing about prison was changing that reality.

A bald guy from the central BOP office in Washington, who seemed nervous, opened the Fair and welcomed us. Programs were handed out, folded photocopies with a drawing of an owl on the cover. Below the owl it read: BE WISE-Women In Secured Employment. On the back of the program were Andy Rooney quotes.

Various companies had committed to participating in the event, many of them nonprofits. The day would include a panel discussion on “Emerging Jobs in the Workforce & How to Land One,” mock job interviews, and Mary Wilson, the legendary Motown singer from the Supremes, was going to deliver a motivational speech. That I had to see. But first, Professional Appareling!